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Research

Dec05
2018

2018 Schooling in America Survey

By Paul DiPerna, Michael Shaw

This annual survey—developed and reported by EdChoice and interviews conducted by our partner, Braun Research, Inc.—measures public opinion and awareness on a range of K–12 education topics, including parents’ schooling preferences, educational choice policies, the federal government’s role in education and more. We report response levels, differences (“margins”) and intensities for the country and a range of demographic groups. And this year, our survey includes an additional sample of current public school teachers to gauge whom they trust and how they feel about their profession, accountability, standardized testing and more.

Breaking Down EdChoice's 2018 National Survey

ADDITIONAL REPORT INFORMATION

In this report, you will learn:

1

Teachers are not satisfied with their jobs, and they trust parents less than students and principals.

We adapted the Net Promoter Score system, which determines to what degree someone would recommend a product or organization, to find out whether teachers are satisfied with their profession. The results were shocking: Nearly three-fourths of teachers in our survey were non-Promoters, meaning they would not recommend teaching in a public school to a friend or colleague. We also found that while majorities of teachers trust their students and principals, they are less inclined to trust their students’ parents and public officials or government agencies.

2

Parents are doing more to help their kids, but they’re still not accessing the schooling types they’d prefer.

Compared to two years ago, parents appear to be sacrificing more to accommodate and support their children’s’ education, including taking an additional job, changing jobs, moving closer to a child’s school or taking out a loan to support a child’s education. On average, majorities of parents express satisfaction with their own schooling experiences, but huge gaps exist between parents’ schooling preferences for their children and actual school type enrollment patterns.

3

Support for school choice remains strong, with ESAs far more popular than any other program among all groups, including teachers. people still are largely unaware how much we spend on K-12 education.

When given a description of an education savings account (ESA), Americans are four times more likely to support this choice-based reform (74%) than oppose it (18%). This is the highest we have seen in the six years we have polled about ESAs—higher than support for vouchers, tax-credit scholarships or charter schools. Unfortunately, Americans still do not know how much we spend on average per student in public K–12 education, with a majority of our survey respondents underestimating per-student funding by at least $3,000.

4

There’s a lot of confusion about K-12 accountability—who should design the system, who should administer it, what it should measure and who should be held accountable.

Public school teachers, parents and the general public all want accountability to be as local as possible, with agreement that ensuring minimum standards in reading and math and identifying schools for assistance should be the broad purposes of a state accountability system. There is, however, no consensus on who should be held most responsible nor what is most important for evaluation. Also noteworthy: Surprising numbers of public school teachers and parents were unsure if their state uses grades or ratings for accountability purposes.